I. Case Study Overview
This article highlights aspects of NXP’s process and results in successfully establishing and formalizing a uniform, centralized IP platform that is automatically updated. NXP’s infrastructure deploys IC Manage IP Central, streamlining the steps for IP producers to make analog and digital IP available for easy accessibility and reuse across all product teams via a robust search capability.
II. Challenge: NXP needed efficient system to fully leverage IP
NXP has a diverse set of analog, mixed-signal, and digital IP for their design teams to leverage, based on several years of development, M&A, and internal growth. They had multiple systems in place to ensure correctness and engineering quality.
Even so, some of these systems were not architected to support web applications and the extensive load from thousands of engineers querying tens of thousands of IP components, each with hundreds of metadata fields. Additionally, NXP’s IP components had no designation as to which IP were reusable or how to access them. Each designer had to track down the original IP owner to find out basic IP information.
III. NXP’s System Supports Both IP Publisher & IP Consumers
NXP created a formal system, with minimal engineering overhead, to publish their IP and make the IP searchable to design teams, with a goal to increase both their engineering efficiency and each designer’s confidence that they were using the best IP for their project.
IP publishers. IP creators have a clear, streamlined, method to publish analog and digital IP into NXP’s IP catalog, with minimal overhead to avoid productivity impact.
NXP’s system has an intuitive workflow that guides the IP developers in completing specific requirements as they progress each IP through multiple stages – from initial capture to officially published, and then for tracing effectiveness of reuse.
IP Consumers. Thousands of engineers can now quickly and efficiently search to identify the optimal IP for their designs from a catalog of thousands of IP across the company.
Hundreds of metadata fields enabling the IP consumers to use general web searches and component catalog-like search, both for effectiveness and to minimize training.
IV. NXP’s Centralized IP Platform – System Attributes
NXP developed internal processes and practices to deploy their solution using IC Manage IP Central. The resulting centralized IP platform attributes covered IP catalog, IP search, consistent metadata organization, IP datasheets, and secure access.
NXP now provides design teams with a searchable IP catalog. The search results are always up to date because the IP catalog continuously pulls in updated metadata fields from other systems, such as NXP’s PLM and tape out systems without administrative intervention. NXP enabled live data access of these systems using IP Central’s API.
There are default search fields for each IP category, plus each engineer can customize their own search results. The system can automatically produce IP data sheets with a mix of common fields (IP owner…) and customizable fields.
Metadata Consistency
NXP used IP Central’s customizable, flexible metadata schema to enable the available IP to be categorized and searchable. NXP can modify or remove metadata fields by editing simple Json files and uploading them to their IP catalog server.
NXP already had existing PLM, issue tracking, tape out tracking, document and data management systems that captured some of the standard IP features, such as technology node, IP name, quality, and maturity. They expanded those fields to provide a richer set of properties, gaining consensus across the company’s producer and consumer teams on a broader set of metadata to control the publishing and search elements, and ensuring there was consistent data available for similar IP types across dozens of different IP categories, such as analog and digital.
Search
NXP’s system has multiple search methods — search results and page loads come back in less than a second.
First, a general-purpose web UI-based search across the entire IP catalog for any occurrence of a string or value of interest. This Google-like search enables keyword searching to find matches.
Second, component catalog-like search where engineers can filter by IP classification, such as analog, digital, amplifier, etc., and for specific properties, including technology node or IP maturity.
IP datasheets
NXP further ensured their engineers had the ability to find IP components and assess their suitability for reuse in new projects, by making available a robust set of additional searchable information in a downloadable IP datasheet — a complete, dynamically-rendered datasheet loads in under one second.
The datasheet content also includes quality levels, whether the IP has been verified in silicon, known bugs, links to release notes. Below is an example of how the schema-driven Web UI layout dynamically renders customized IP datasheets
IP Security
The system enforced detailed access and security policies with the flexibility to assign permissions to specific user groups for specific IP categories or to specific users for individual IPs.
V. IP Publisher Workflow
NXP established a workflow for the IP publisher, with a specific set of IP states to enable IP creator and their managers to keep track of IP. This diagram shows these states.
IP Central acts as a workflow staging area for new IP to be assigned to the appropriate owner who will ensure the IP meets the predefined criteria for admission into the IP catalog.
NXP assigned access and modification roles as part of their IP workflow. “IP Curators” have global access privileges. They can start with a newly identified IP and assign it an IP classification (e.g., RF/Amplifier), along with the engineering group owner and plus one or more IP owners, so that it can move into the pre-published state.
The IP owners add the necessary IP properties to move the IP to a published state. Once the IP is published, it is ready for reuse and will be visible in IP search results by the general user community.
It is also possible to cancel an IP as part of the workflow. A cancelled IP no longer appears in search results but is not actually deleted from the system. An IP curator can then later decide to reactivate a canceled IP without having to recreate the IP or its metadata.
VI. IP Usage Report Generation
NXP uses IP Central’s API and command line interfaces to generate IP reports across the entire repository or any subsection and return one or more of the 100+ IP properties in table form, CSV for spreadsheets, or JSON for integration into external processing scripts or enterprise systems.
VII. Conclusion: A centralized IP platform improves company-wide IP reuse
NXP has now deployed its centralized IP platform, including its IP catalog to its entire IC design community, enabling an efficient workflow for distributed groups of IP producers to create, update and publish thousands of IPs.
Project architects and integrators now easily find, compare, and leverage a company-wide set of reusable IP, with up-to-date, consistent information based on automated linkage to NXP’s IP & SOC design configuration management platform.
Both IP developers and IP consumers gain efficiencies from the system’s customizable, high-performance interfaces that cover a wide set of IP classification types and properties. Engineering management benefits from their ability to access progress reports on IP compatibility and reuse levels across multiple products, along with a constant feed of new potential new IP candidates.
NXP Lifecycle Management System